at9

AFAIK, Italian Heels are made in.............Italy!

Skyscrapers are based in the UK. One can only hope they manufacture there too.

I have a pair of these or something very like them from Italian Heels. Bought secondhand a few years ago and worn occasionally. Nice quality plain black leather with 5" heel in UK9. Gorgeous gold leather lining. The shafts are rather wide on my slim legs.

http://www.italianheels.com/cgi-bin/showbig2.pl?categoria=boots&lang=en&item=4179&g=y

i don't know if Italian Heels are still recommendable. i've never ordered directly from them myself.

Congratulations on the 1000. If you joined in 2002 that must make you one of the earliest members.

I've been here since 2006 and have a few hundred posts.

I noticed the bold "if" only just in time.

If "ifs" and "ands" were pots and pans.....

9 hours ago, Heelster said:

That's what I saw too. I'm still on the sidelines with the Crypto Currency, but the blockchain as a transactional function does have me pondering the possibilities.

Some soon to be graduates in Computer Science do not seem to think the security implied is there yet, and as one student mentioned, "nothing is hack proof" but the concept does merit further research.

PS - - Nvidia is making a killing in the graphics card business. So many people are trying to mine the crypto currencies, it's putting a huge strain on the graphics card supply. The prices for cards are going to insane levels. Maybe the best bet is to invest in Invidia for awhile as I doubt they will be losing money for some time to come.

In a goldrush, it's best to be the guy selling shovels:)

Another worry is that there's some evidence that mining of Bitcoin is now concentrated in the hands of a very few people or organisations. This gives them the potential to control the "currency" in a way that's a lot less accountable than fiat currencies are controlled by govenments.

Link to the Woman's Hour item. May not be available outside the UK:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09nrs76#play

I heard a trail today for Woman's Hour tomorrow (Tuesday) for an item about women with bigger feet. BBC Radio4, 10am.

Found whille browsing https://www.improbable.com/

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01875/full

Like so many booms, the few who are lucky and/or fleet of foot (even if wearing heels) will make fortunes. The majority of punters will lose. The even greater majority of those who stood on the sidelines will neither win nor lose, though they might be caught in the fallout. Yes, there's the opportunity cost of NOT doing something. If I'd put £1000 into Bitcoin a few years ago and cashed out recently I'd have done very nicely thankyou. £1000 is a sum I can afford to lose though I'd rather not. As it is, I've made more modest returns on that £1000 in stockmarket based investments.

If you've got a decent sized investment portfolio you can afford some gambling money, the amount depending on your temperament. I'm not a very "hands on" investor. I'm not in the business of tracking the markets day by day, let alone hour by hour. It might make me a lot of money but I'd find it an excrutiatingly dull and unproductive thing to do. So I'm not investing in crypto currencies.

The people I worry about are those with limited resources who put a large fraction of their very limited savings into a high risk financial product. Especially those people who have little understanding of risk. Of course somebody in desperate circumstances might consider betting their last $$ on Bitcoin, roulette or the horses but that's real last ditch tactics.

The January 2018 issue of Scientific American has a set of articles about blockchain, cryptocurrencies etc. Well worth reading for anyone with an interest in the subject.

The single most important thing I've got from those articles is that these technologies are in their infancy, there's a lot of people with a stake in some part of the process (not just bitcoin) and they won't go away in a hurry. Exactly how they will affect our futures is of course unknown and unknowable. I expect a bumpy ride, with many failures and possibly some great successes. Rather like the dotcom boom almost 20 years ago.

If there's such a thing as an official conversion UK8=EU42. Some manufacturers have different opinions. Even then it's often hard to be sure what size you're really getting. I've tried UK9 shoes from Aldo which were more like UK7.

There is something approaching a flood of articles in non-specialist publications about Bitcoin. Another:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/dec/03/bitcoin-investors-hoping-billions-sack-fools-gold

One of the themes of these articles is that Bitcoin is currently mainly used for speculation rather than commercial transactions. I know there is a huge amount of speculation in fiat currencies ($$, ££ etc) but we all use them every day as a genuine medium of exchange.

Another article worth reading:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129553-700-bitcoin-how-its-core-technology-will-change-the-world/

Martin Lewis is one of the most respected financial commnentators in the UK. His blog post on Bitcoin is worth reading:

https://blog.moneysavingexpert.com/2017/11/30/invest-bitcoin-four-things-need-know/

These and many others suggest that it's right to walk heel first:

http://www.whowhatwear.co.uk/how-to-walk-in-heels

https://www.wikihow.com/Walk-in-High-Heels

http://www.foreveramber.co.uk/2015/05/how-to-walk-in-high-heels-without-pain-and-without-falling-over.html

2 bits of wisdom:

Past performance is no guide to future returns.

Don't wager more than you can afford to lose.

At the moment it rather looks like others are being greedy. And there's very public encouragement for others to be greedy too, judging by the adverts in the press and elsewhere.

Actually fiat currencies also have a problem with underlying value. They are no more than a promise by the state. If that goes wrong, as it has done quite a few times, then you end up with hyperinflation.

I'm not opposed to crypto currencies in principle. They may turn out to be a good thing, or at least some of them might be. I don't think that Bitcoin will be one of the ones that survives, for the reasons I stated in my last post.

Another major problem in using Bitcoin is that its use doesn't scale very well. The blockchain is only updated every 10 minutes which makes it pretty useless for a lot of day to day transactions. There's also the worry that you can spend the same bitcoin twice within that 10 minutes and only one recipient will get paid.

Recently on the Tube (London Underground railways) I've seen advertisments for cryto currency trading. There are strong warnings in small print about it being high risk etc. If it's being advertised like that it feels like something nasty will happen. No doubt a few will win handsomely. Most will lose.

The blockchain may well be a very good basis for a currency. It also has application to conventional banking. But I doubt that Bitcoin, with its energy hungry mining and lack of scalability, will become the main crypto currency of the future.

When a quantum computer (or an advance in number theory) allows large products of primes to be factorised in a practical time then the whole of internet security comes crashing down. Every time you go to a https webpage there's an RSA key exchange using the properties of large prime numbers. Crack that and there's no such thing as a secure online transaction.

Very few women (or men) could wear this outfit well in an everyday environment. It's very much for the right sort of club or special occasion.

8 hours ago, kneehighs said:

This is the best point I've seen so far in this thread and a great argument against BTC. 

Yet, it can be argued that electricity is an infinite resource, especially when drawn from renewable resources.  Plus, the market demand will ultimately determine sustainability over time.  If the demand exists, people will find a way to make it work.

Not strictly infinite, though solar (PV and/or thermal) resource is potentially so large as to make it seem so.

The market will indeed determine the future of bitcoin and other cryto currencies. 20:20 hindsight is a wonderful tool for assessing the past. If you had invested in bitcoin a little while ago you would have won handsomely. However it is pretty useless for forecasting the future. If you buy bitcoin now it's not a guaranteed win, it's an outright bet with utterly unknown and unknowable odds.

I'm not sure if bitcoin amounts to a zero sum game. In other words if I win £1000 then others elsewhere must lose £1000.

Whether you pro or anti bitcoin, one thing cannot be denied: they are an ecological horror story. The energy cost of mining bitcoin is high.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/policy/the-ridiculous-amount-of-energy-it-takes-to-run-bitcoin

There are possible fixes for this but the energy cost of mining needs to come down for bitcoin to play a major role as a currency. I think that Etherium has fixed this problem so it might be that in the medium term bitcoin will be an "also ran" in crypto currencies. Much as bebo and others lost to facebook and many early online retailers lost out to Amazon.

Fiat currencies have energy costs too. In minting coins, printing notes, distributing credit cards etc but I think these are relatively small compared to face value. Though when the scrap value of pennies (US or UK) became higher than the face value the composition was changed from bronze to plated steel.

I use Irfanview for all simple picture editing. It's free, quick and easy to use.

http://www.irfanview.com/

If I simply want to reduce the size of a picture file there are plenty of "right click" tools for Windows. Example: https://www.digitalred.com/support/windows/image-resizing/

When editing images don't confuse the number of pixels with file size. You can have a lot of pixels but small files if you use a lot of JPEG compression. This usually gives better quality than reducing the number of pixels and using less JPEG compression.

I don't know about equivalent tools for Linux and Mac.